Environmental stuff

Environmental & Fair Trade policies

Fair Trade Policy - Many companies make a big deal about Fair Trade in order to justify their high prices, when in reality they only stock a handfull of fair trade items. Our policy is simple.

We are a customer driven company and our main priority is to provide our customers with what they want. For any given item we wish to stock we try to find a manufacturer here in Cornwall, as we feel it is important to support our local crafts people and our local economy. If a product cannot be sourced locally, we try to find a Fair Trade supplier for the product and take that option if it is available. Consequentially, the vast majority of the productcs available in our shop are "Fair Trade" items.

In fact it is fair to say that the most exploited labour force involved with The Lavender Pillow are the people who work here in the shop, who work very long hours, 7 days a week, under difficult circumstances and do it mostly for love.

Environmental policy - Packaging - Unfortunatley, in the gift trade, there is no escape from large amounts of packaging. Most of the products we stock come packaged in cardboard, bubblewrap and the dreaded polystyrene. We try to recycle as much of this as possible by reusing the bubblewrap to wrap our customers purchases. We recycle most of the cardboard and polystyrene by reusing it for packaging up our mail order items. Some of our mail order customers may wonder what's going on when they recieve odd shape boxes with odd shaped bits of polystyrene stuffed in around the edges..... now you know why. In this way we are able to reduce the amount of waste we produce to a minimum. However we are constantly frustrated by our local waste disposal site, who have a cardboard recycling skip but will not take our excess cardboard because it is "Trade Waste" Fortunately we have found an alternative recycling facility. We are pleased to note that a lot of our suppliers are starting to use things like old newspapers and shredded paper/cardboard for packaging rather than the plastic alternatives.

Environmental Policy - Bags - We package small items in recycled paper bags which we try to make as fun and interesting as possible, in the hope that people will like them enough to keep them and reuse them for other purposes.

We have also (at great expense) had biodegradable carrier bags made in purple with our cute fairy logo on them. We have made them as attractive as possible so that poeple will keep using them again and again rather than throwing them away. Several of our customers tell us that our carriers last months of constant use. Which all helps reduce the load on the landfill sites. We have also installed low energy bulbs in our light fittings and now have to put up with customers who tell us it's too dark in our shop. (since when have Goth shops been bright places).......You can't please everyone I suppose.